Feminism's cash cow implodes

What a week. It's been just fascinating watching what's happening in the domestic violence industry which funds much of the feminist enterprise in this country.

Our Watch, the engine room for the mighty $3 billion business, is under attack. Feminists are suddenly eating their own, as key players go public with revelations showing Our Watch's utterly ruthless suppression of data that challenged their prescribed orthodoxy about gender inequality being the main cause of domestic violence.

Michael Salter, a UNSW feminist criminologist, has launched a major assault on Our Watch in an article in The Saturday Paper, which revealed that, back in 2014, the Victorian government asked him to conduct a review of "drivers" of violence against women. When he produced it, Our Watch wasn't happy with his conclusions and demanded he delete evidence about the role of alcohol and poverty in family violence. When he refused, his "review" was then rewritten by other researchers.

Our Watch wasn't going to cop any distraction from their gender transformative project – which, under the guise of tackling domestic violence, was actually intent on "social, cultural and structural and systemic change" – essentially redistributing power between men and women. (Read more about Our Watch's audacious plan for resetting our society in my blog from three years ago.)

The Saturday Paper quotes Professor Slater saying that he was assured by a representative from the Victorian government that he shouldn't be too concerned about his evidence being omitted. "We need to imagine this future society that we want to live in. And that vision is not about alcohol. It's not about class." Indeed not. Their vision is about neutered men, kowtowing to women.

There was no way any pesky researcher could be allowed to state there were other complex drivers for domestic violence. This was just at the time the ideologues behind Our Watch were planning their massive "Stop it at the Start" television campaign, designed to demonize boys and men. By the following year, Malcolm Turnbull, in his first act as Prime Minister, was solemnly pronouncing that domestic violence was all about respect for women.

This was to be the only permitted narrative. Big bucks were at stake, with Michael Salter claiming on Radio National this week that about $300 million was spent on that attitude change campaign, most of it funding the Our Watch bureaucrats. He's made it clear in his tweets that Our Watch was ruthless in only funding people who ran the party line.

Around the same time another person who ran into this censorship from domestic violence bodies was Professor Peter Miller, an expert on research on alcohol and violence from Deakin University. Miller was also commissioned by the Victorian government to do research on alcohol's role in interpersonal violence. Here too, the research was not published because they didn't like his conclusion that alcohol was a causal factor.

In his evidence to the 2016 Victorian Royal Commission into domestic violence, Miller made it clear that the prescribed approach was wrong: "A sole focus on the gendered nature of family violence which labels men as the perpetrators and women as the victims and which identifies gender inequity as the principal 'cause' of family violence is problematic at a number of levels." His advice was ignored by the Commission.

For over a decade, the domestic violence industry has kept a lid on any objective discussion of the complex causes of domestic violence, let alone the fact that half of the perpetrators are female. Controlling the cash cow has proved a very effective means of keeping control of the narrative.

So why has it all blown up now? Well, the trigger was the manufactured crisis following several domestic homicides earlier this year which led to talk from the Albanese government about needing to do more. Under pressure, the government announced a review of Our Watch's prevention strategy by a new "Expert Panel". Interestingly this excluded the Our Watch CEO but included prominent journalist Jess Hill who has built her career promoting the feminist line on domestic violence.